An elective affinity
Jarrell and the Germans
Richard K. Cross
“I CAME INTO Randall’s life,” recalls Mary
Jarrell, “after Salzburg and Rilke, about
the middle of Mahler; and I got to stay
through Goethe and up to Wagner.”’ Her
readiness to mark stages of her husband’s
life in terms of people and places German
finds an echo in Karl Shapiro’s remark
that Jarrell’s Selected Poems might take
as its subtitle “Hansel and Gretel in
America.”2 The world of Grimm’s Murchen: that is in fact the substrate upon
which the poet’s response to German
history and culture, as well as much else
not specifically German at all, rests. “He
was completely at home in the strange
and intense poetry of German folk tales,”
notes Hannah Arendt, to whose apartment Jarrell came to hear German
spoken. “I often thought that the country
the German language represented to him
was actually where he came from . . . ; it
was as though he had , . . emerged from
the enchanted forests in which we spent
our childhood, bringing with him the
magic flute.’I3
Compare that evocation of Jarrell with
these lines from his “Deutsch durch
Freud”:
Dearer to me than all the treasures of
the earth
Is something living, said old Rumpelstiltskin
And hopped home. Charcoal-burners
heard him singing
And spoiled it all. . . . And all because If only he hadn’t known his name!
In German I don’t know my name,
I am the log
The fairies left one morning in my
place.
- In German I believe in them, in
e~erything.~
Just as the poet savors the mystery at the
heart of the Miirchen, so too he drolly insists on the obscurity of the tongue: “Till
the day I die I’ll be in love with German/If only I don’t learn German” (C 268). Mary
Jarrell and Hannah Arendt confirm that
he refused to speak the language and only
half-understood what he heard. Thus German words retained for him a metaphorical freshness that allows him in
“The Night before the Night before
Christmas,” for example, to engage in a
bilingual pun on Engel:
white
As the down of the wing of an angel;
white
As the beard of Friedrich Engels (CP
50).
A related form of word-play occurs in
“Seele im Raum,” where the speaker
associates the adjective elend with an imaginary eland, which is both a symptom of
her chronic unhappiness and a compensation for it. The eland gives a meaning with
some relish of the unicorn tradition to suffering for which a world grown blankly
secular can offer only clinical diagnoses.
As poems like “The Carnegie Library,
Juvenile Division” and “Children Selecting
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Books in a Library” make plain, Jarrell’s
fascination with German folk tales is
anterior to and deeper than his concern
with the language. In the former poem,
beasts loom in the green
Firred darkness of the marchen: country the child thought life
And wished for and crept to out of his
own life (CP 98).
That alternate homeland does not, of
course, represent unalloyed pleasure.
“Their tales,” he reminds us in “Children
Selecting Books,”
are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious
infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet
escaped
Except by luck or magic (CP 106).
And why does the child - the small boy
alive and fearful in each of us - prefer to
take his trouble in fairy-tale versions?
“Because we live,” Jarrell concludes, “By
trading another’s sorrow for our own;
another’s/lmpossibilities, still unbelieved
in, for our own” (CP 107). That fictive
other seems so beautifully fated in comparison with one’s own ragtag existence.
Since the miraculous empowering of
desire evident in the tales seldom or never
occurs outside them, its appeal, in
moments of half-suspended incredulity, is
all the more potent. What one wishes for,
finally, is self-transcendence: “change
me!” is the cry that sounds explicitly
through “Children Selecting Books,” “The
Marchen,” “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” and implicitly through a host of
other poems.
By Suzanne Ferguson’scount, Jarrell invokes no fewer than thirty-six of the
Grimms’ tales, his concern with them
peaking in The Seven-League Crutches
where roughly a fourth of the poems in
some measure derive from MUr~hen.~
More prominent than any other motif Shapiro was right - is the Hansel and
Gretel story, which figures in at least five
poems, ranging from a parenthetical
reference in “The Night before the Night
before Christmas” through the poet’s unfolding of the psychological implications
of conflict between mother and child in “A
Quilt-Pattern’’ and of their eventual reconciliation in “The House in the Wood’ to his
intricate elaboration of the theme in “The
Mirchen,” where Hansel becomes the
hero of a monomyth. Jarrell’s sometimes
very free adaptations reflect his sense of
the proximity of folk narrative to dreamwork. “The Marchen” in particular depends upon such oneiric devices as condensation and displacement, as the following lines bear witness:
Hansel, to map the hard way, cast his
bones
Up clouds to Paradise; His sparrows ate
And he plunged home, past peat and
measures, to his kin
Furred in the sooty darkness of the
cave
Where the old gods nodded. How the
devil’s beard
Coiled round the dreaming Hansel, till
his limbs
Grew gnarled as a fakir’s on the spindling Cross
The missions rowed from Asia: eternal
corpse
Of the Scapegoat, gay with His bloods
watered beads,
Red wax in the new snow (strange to
His warmed stare);
The wooden mother and the choir of
saints, His stars;
And God and His barons, always, iron
behind.
Gorged Hansel felt his blood burn thin
as air
In a belly swollen with the airy kine;
How many ages boiled Christ’s bark for
SOUP! (CP 82-83).
This is Jarrell at his most gnomic, his verse
as gnarled as those fakir’s limbs. In the
end troglodyte-Hansel and Christ-Hansel
yield to Hansel the protagonist of the
Grimms’ “Fisherman and his Wife,” who
Said to the flounder for his first wish,
Let me wish
And let my wish be granted (CP 85).
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The ultimate desideratum, it would seem,
is to live in a realm where volition is king
and where one is no longer bound by an
enduring shape or essence. We may think
of Jarrell himself as a Hansel, unfortunate
in his parents and early circumstances,
who as an adult tried, through imagination, to understand and forgive and thus to
lighten the burden of identity, even if he
could not slip out from under it altogether.
Rather than repressing his childhood, the
poet employs fairy tales to help release its
extraordinary energies. “Without innocence,” he quotes Hofmannsthal as saying, “no one creates or enjoys a work of
art.”6
What Jarrell owes to Jakob and Wilhelm
Grimm may be the largest of his German
debts, but there are others nearly as great.
Consider, for instance, his Wahloerwandschaft with Goethe, “the last of the Old
Ones”; to compare even the most accomplished of our contemporaries to him,
Jarrell declares, is to become “saddened
and frightened at how much the poet’s
scope has n a r r ~ w e d . ” ~He invokes
Coethe’s authority more than thirty times
in the four volumes of collected essays,
never perhaps more memorably than in
“Poets, Critics, and Readers” when he
quotes Goethe to the effect that “all great
excellence in life or art, at its first recognition, brings with it a certain pain arising
from the strongly felt inferiority of the
spectator; only at a later period, when we
take it into our own culture, and appropriate as much of it as our capacities
allow, do we learn to love and esteem it.”8
Love is certainly Jarrell’s way of coming
to terms with his “own favorite daemon”
(CP 267), as he calls Goethe in “Deutsch
durch Freud.” In comparison with his
criticism or with Pictures from an Institution, in which both the narrator and the
Austrian-Jewish composer Gottfried Rosenbaum are fond of citing Goethe, Jarrell’s poems contain few direct references
to him or signs of his influence. There are
several Faust echoes. The late poem
“Hope” intones: “Back far enough, down
deep enough, one comes to the Mothers”
(CP 310). A characteristically Jarrellian in-
version of Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles occurs in “A Conversation with the
Devil”:
“If ever I don’t say
To the hour of life that I can wish for:
stay ,
Thou art so fair! why you may have
my Shadow.”
................................
One makes a solitude and calls it peace.
So you phrased it; yet - yet - one is
paid:
To see things as they are, to make them
what they might be Old Father of Truths, old Spirit that
Accepts That’s something (CP 30).
Goethe the aphorist remains accessible;
Goethe the poet, however much one admires him, is harder to scale. Jarrell’s
greatest tribute to him is his translation of
Faust, Part One. Since I have discussed
Jarrell’s Faust (and his other translations)
in some detail elsewhere? I shall confine
myself here to pointing out that it is one of
the most readable versions we’have of a
work notoriously difficult to render into
English.
The other poet writing in German
toward whom Jarrell felt a peculiar bond
was, of course, Rainer Maria Rilke, whom
he regarded as quite simply the finest poet
of our century, superior even to Yeats.
Jarrell calls up the Bohemian master in
the essays as often as he does Goethe,
usually as a benchmark he can use to take
the measure of contemporary poets. I am
by no means alone in seeing Jarrell’s
translations of Rilke eighteen of them in
the Complete Poems - as among the best
we have; one can only regret that he did
not live long enough to undertake the
Duino Elegies. Goethean elements may be
hard to find in Jarrell’s verse, but one sees
evidence of Rilke everywhere, especially
in poems like “The State” and “Come to
the Stone . . .” that are seen through the
eyes of children or those with female personae like “The Woman at the
Washington Zoo” and “Seele im Raum,”
-
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the last of these Rilkean in title as well as
treatment. The challenge with which
Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” with
which any art that cuts sufficiently close to
the bone, confronts us - Du rnusst dein
Leben andern - is, as we have seen, the
leitmotif of Jarrell’s poetry.
In speaking of Jarrell’s involvement
with the Germans, one should not forget
that he came of intellectual age at a time
when the word “German” brought to
mind not only a land of Dichter und Denker, but a political order that had turned
its back on them, choosing instead to
wed sophisticated technology to barbarous instinct. One recalls Goering’s dictum that whenever he heard somebody
mention Kultur he reached for his pistol.
The poems for which Jarrell first became
known concerned the war. These tend to
focus on its corruptive impact on Americans:
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in
school,
as he says in “Losses” (CP 145). There are
several poems that do, however, deal with
its effects on Germany, including such
powerful ones as “The Angels at Hamburg” and “A Camp in the Prussian
Forest.” In the former we see Hamburg
caught up in a firestorm that makes it appear “no longer a city” but rather an
adumbration of the last day:
Here at midnight there is no darkness,
At day no light.
The air is smoke and the earth ashes
Where he was fire (CP 191-92).
This condition, the poet indicates, reflects
a process of dehumanization so thoroughgoing that men no longer respond to conscience, “the fiery judge/Who walks like
an angel . . . within the laboring breast.” In
the consequent void, the bombs that rain
upon Hamburg translate themselves into
falling angels, “their message: There is no
justice, man, but death”; indiscriminate,
mechanical terror has so brutalized the
populace that they can do no more than
dumbly watch, “not loving, not hating
their judges, who neither love nor hate”
(CP 191). The poem offers us the vision of
a Dies Irae in which all parties have the
experience but miss the meaning.
Next to the involuted meditative strategy of “The Angels at Hamburg,” “A
Camp in the Prussian Forest” has the stark
immediacy of a documentary film. And
yet its homely figures and emphatic
rhymes, some yielding grimly witty surprises, confer a dignity beyond the reach
of cinema upon the victims. Moved by the
dreadful spectacle, the speaker, one of the
liberators, recounts:
I paint the star I sawed from yellow
pine And plant the sign
In soil that does not yet refuse
Its usual Jews
Their first asylum (CP 167-68).
This touching gesture is mocked, though,
by the smoke and ash from the
crematorium that, still hanging in the air,
deposit a sooty shroud upon the star and
the surrounding woods. The question this
appalling residue raises is whether the
horror that “A Camp in the Prussian
Forest” depicts is anything peculiarly German. What happened in a country whose
traditions of civility stretch back a
millennium could, one cannot but think,
occur anywhere. We have it in us, Jarrell’s
poems remind us, to bring Armageddon
upon ourselves with no recourse to the
supernatural.
If one believes that art merely imitates,
rather than is an
- intimate part of, the
life it expresses - Jarrell would not have
subscribed to the former view - then the
poet’s German experiences were all
secondhand until 1948, when he traveled
to Europe for the first time in order to
teach at the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization. Judging from a majority
of the poems that came out of this stay
and subsequent travels in Middle Europe,
what he chiefly encountered was art,
although with the stress on opera, painting, sculpture, and architecture rather
than on literature.’O Consider, in this con-
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I
I
nection, “The Knight, Death, and the
Devil,” a wonderfully precise evocation
and brilliant reading of a Diirer engraving
or, better still, “An English Garden in
Austria,” a hybrid bred from the sight - it
hardly matters whether actual or imagined - of a carefully disarranged plot of
real estate and Hofmannsthal’s libretto for
Der Rosenkavalier. In it the poet engages
in a high-spirited meditation on a medley
of themes drawn from the words and
deeds of eighteenth-century musicians,
philosophes, kings, and litterateurs, concluding with a diminuendo that features
Marx, Stalin, Hitler, and Lincoln Steffens.
Knowing that thisjeu d’esprit would make
hard going for many readers and not
wanting to leave them out of the fun, Jarrell the teacher cheerfully supplies nearly
a page of gloss in Selected Poems.
That “Hohensalzburg: Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Romantic Character”
is compounded of dreams and folk tales
everyone agrees; that its romantic theme
might have roots as deep in reality as they
are in fantasy has not, however, been
generally acknowledged. An exception is
Parker Tyler, who long ago noted that the
poem “blends the Sleeping Beauty motif
with what seems a contemporary amour
set in the milieu of Fascist-tempered
Europe.”I1That amour, the germ of it, was
Jarrell’s liaison with Elisabeth Eisler, a student at the Salzburg Institute during the
summer of 1948. “Hohensalzburg” might
be regarded as the poet’s valediction, permitting a degree of mourning, for she had,
by the time he published it in Poetry
magazine the next spring, ceased to be a n
actual presence in his life - “In the end
one wakes from everything” (CP 91)
and become one of his ghosts, albeit a still
lively and potentially dangerous one.
Shortly before her death, Fraulein Eisler
told Mary Jarrell that the affair had, out of
respect for the poet’s married estate and
perhaps, one suspects, for other reasons
too, never been consummated. In the
poem, the speaker, summoning his last
strength, extends his arms and cries:
-
I
“I want you”; and the words were
I
so heavy
That they hung like darkness over the
world,
And you said to me, softly: You must
not so.
I am only a girl.
Before I was a ghost I was only a girl
(CP 89).
Here it is the ghost, the Dornroschen
figure, who demands abstinence. In “The
Sleeping Beauty: Variation of the Prince,”
it is the protagonist who, in a Jarrellian
version of Liebestod, eschews sexual
fulfillment, laying Death’s sword between
himself and the beloved.
One last poem stemming from Jarrell’s
sojourn in Austria, “A Game at Salzburg,”
deserves mention, not because it requires
much elucidation - the only item that
might need explaining, the little ritual of
reassurance played out between adults
and children, Jarrell himself takes care of
in a note - but because it brings together
so poignantly several of the poet’s
characteristic themes: war and its aftermath, mostly bitter; the attractions of an
old, high civilization, even - or perhaps
especially - in a humbled condition; the
exquisite vulnerability of childhood. With
this last he identifies himself and, more
strikingly, the world, which must one feels
be somebody’s prodigal offspring. “A
Game at Salzburg” is much less mannered,
far more direct, in its treatment of these
subjects than his other poems with a European focus. Robert Lowell praises it for
having “the broken, charmed motion of
someone thinking out loud,”12as well he
might, for it is an early and distinguished
instance of the confessional mode of
which he and Jarrell are the co-creators. It
is also a prime example of the extent to
which its author had succeeded in
assimilating European sensibility to a
nature at bottom profoundly American.
“The Orient Express” is another such
poem. Its speaker, who evinces the
familiar combination of child-like freshness of perception and mature powers of
discrimination, remarks that
at evening
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As the lands darken, a questioning
Precariousness comes over everything
(CP 65).
Just this sense of “questioning precariousness,” evident in German and Austrian art,
philosophy, folk tales, politics, and mores,
draws Jarrell to these evening lands in the
heart of dus Abendlund, for it corresponds
to the anxious, skeptical humanism that
seems native to his temperament. Jarrell’s
is the sort of skepticism that interrogates
itself as rigorously as it does the rest of existence and finds, ultimately, not the void
but, as he says later in the poem,
something, the same thing
Behind everything: all these little
villages,
A passing woman, a field of grain,
The man who says good-bye to his
wife A path through a wood full of lives
(CP 66).
For two or three centuries now men
have called that path, somewhat nondescriptly, Europe; before that they would
have given it a more precise name:
Christendom. That older order - not its
theology or institutions but the mythos expressed in its art - retains for Jarrell considerable power. In “The Augsburg Adoration” we see him enjoying the sights,
aligning himself with the past, in Ulm and
Augsburg, the latter still offering reminders of its Roman foundation:
I“The Group of Two,” in Randall Jarrell,
1914-1965, ed. Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and
Robert Penn Warren (New York, 1967), p. 274. *“In
the Forests of the Little People,” New York Times
Book Reoiew, 13 March 1955; reprinted in Critical
Essays on Randall Jarrell, ed. Suzanne Ferguson
(Boston, 1983), p. 30. 3“Randall Jarrell,” in Randall
Jarrell, 1914-1965, p. 5. 4“Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York, 1969), p. 266. Subsequent
page references appear in the text preceded by
“CP.” SThe Poetry of Randall Jarrell (Baton Rouge,
La., 1971), pp. 1 1 1 , 242-43. 6“Poets, Critics, and
Readers,” A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (New
York, 1962), p. 95. 7“Tothe Laodiceans,” Poetry and
the Age (1955; London, 1973), p. 69. Sad Heart at
Travellers, we come to Rome, Ulm,
Augsburg,
To adore something: the child nursing
at the stone
Breast beside a stone ox, a stone ass, a
flesh-and-blood
Sparrow who nests in the manger.
The Three Kings
Bring him stones and stones and stones,
the sparrow
Brings a straw (CP 346).
The child‘s appeal to this poet, the latest
magus, is self-evident; the sparrow provides the surprise. And yet the sparrow
belongs in the Nativity scene, belongs indeed everywhere, for, as Jesus said, “One
of them shall not fall/On the ground
without your Father” (CP 346; Matt.
10:29). The immanent force that attends
the sparrow, could that be “the same
thing/Behind everything” one might
believe in? In “Bamberg,” written during
the troubled final year of his life, Jarrell
meditates on a tympanum depicting the
Last Judgment. “The blest and the
damned,” he reflects.
Both smile exactly alike
At remembering so well
All they meant to remember
To tell God (CP 490).
We may wonder if, for once, Jarrell has
left his irony at home. Or perhaps he expects der liebe Cott will understand.
the Supermarket, p. 100. g“YOu Must Change Your
Life,” Parnassus 1 1 (spring-summer 1983). 264-69,
and “Jarrell’s Translations:The Poet as Elective Middle European,” in Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell,
pp. 310-320. The second of these includes a discussion of the Rilke translations. ’OOne can begin to
gauge the extent to which the German-speaking
countries were for the poet an art world from Mary
Jarrell’s recollections of a trip the two of them took
in 1963, in Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965, pp. 294-95.
““The Dramatic Lyricism of Randall Jarrell,”Poetry
79 (1952); reprinted in Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell, p. 144. 12“RandallJarrell’s Wild Dogmatism,”
New York Times Book Review. October 7 , 1951;
reprinted in Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell, p. 28.
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